NORMANDY — A bitter fight has been bubbling in Normandy, and its participants say nothing less than the city’s future is at stake.
In recent months, government has nearly ground to a halt in this north St. Louis County municipality of roughly 4,900 residents. A power struggle between the mayor and City Council over finances, hiring, policies and personalities has resulted in the mayor suing six council members; two former employees alleging discrimination; and the city working to pay off a mortgage on City Hall it took out to buy a building across Natural Bridge Road that now sits vacant.
Normandy borders the University of Missouri-St. Louis and is among the largest of the dozen or so cities sprinkled along Natural Bridge, east of Interstate 170. It is the latest in a line of St. Louis County municipalities to engage in political turmoil. Some of those cities have recovered; others have faced years of dysfunction and debt, and even folded.
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An unpopular consolidation effort that would have removed many municipal functions from St. Louis County’s 88 municipalities began in 2019 and collapsed months later, leaving a political jigsaw puzzle intact.
In Normandy, conflict was on full display at City Hall earlier this month when Mayor Mark Beckmann, alone in the meeting chamber, struggled to control a City Council meeting agenda while council members weighed in through Zoom. Beckmann pounded his gavel and tried to stop Councilman Maurice Hunt from proposing — out of order — a reduction in the mayoral emergency spending power.
The council ultimately approved the motion later in the agenda. Longtime Normandy resident David Hoang, who was attending his first council meeting that night, said he was shocked to see the chaos playing out before him.
“It just soured the entire small government perspective for me,” Hoang said. “Local government needs to function. You can’t have anarchy and you can’t have these stalemates that just end up as a shouting match and gavel pounding. This is not how adults function. This is ‘Lord of the Flies.’”
Public officials and residents say the city’s recent woes can be traced at least to January 2020 when Mayor Patrick Green, who had led the city since 2009, resigned under a cloud of council investigations into credit card expenses. Green cited health reasons for his departure.
Shortly before that, longtime public works director Rodney Jarrett had died unexpectedly, taking with him decades of experience that kept many city services afloat, council members and officials said.
The council appointed Hunt to take over as temporary mayor, and the city hired Tim Fischesser, former director of the Municipal League of Metro St. Louis, as a temporary city administrator to help Normandy get back on its feet.
Fischesser said he wasn’t quite prepared for the “jumbled mess” of bills, broken equipment and lack of written policies and procedures he found.
Fischesser said he worked to right-size a bloated public works department and encouraged leaders to contract with other municipalities, like Ferguson, to buy items such as gasoline or rock salt to save money and prevent stealing.
He helped devise a plan to deal with COVID-19 and tried to encourage the city to adopt bidding processes and better record-keeping procedures. But most of the time, Fischesser said, he was forced to chase after months-old bills or emergency repairs that popped up like “little fires.”
“I probably spent a third of my time trying to figure out who we owed money to and why,” he said. “It was very frustrating to be there.”
‘Watch the city burn’
Hunt said he, too, was inundated during his roughly 15 months as mayor. He said he worked hard to settle debts, deal with COVID-19, establish new programs and make some “drastic” changes, including firing several employees.
One of those was interim public works director Kevin Gibson, who is white. Gibson sued the city in April and accused Hunt, who is Black, of trying to systematically rid Normandy of white workers. He alleged Hunt made statements like, “We’re going to get rid of all these white (expletive) and it’ll be an all-Black ran (sic) city like it should be.”
The city, in a court filing, denied the allegation. That lawsuit continues.
Hunt then hired new people, including contract code enforcement officer Regina Fitzgerald, who replaced Jarrett in public works. He also hired a human resources payroll specialist and a police chief, following the resignation of previous Chief Frank Mininni.
Hunt said in an interview that all of those people were qualified for their jobs and were hired with approval of the council.
But when Beckmann began running for mayor last year, he called Hunt’s hires unqualified, “crony” appointees. He vowed to hire a city administrator, fix delays in public works projects and correct what he called financial mismanagement.
Hunt’s supporters, including several members of the all-Black council, accused Beckmann of working to get his friends and family on the city’s payroll and to put power in the hands of a few, predominantly white, residents.
Beckmann defeated Hunt on April 6 by five votes. Hunt remained on the council.
Two months later, Beckmann, along with some residents and a councilwoman, began calling for police Chief Mark Hall to step down after a police report from 2013 surfaced in which a woman accused Hall of striking her and destroying her belongings. He had been working as a St. Louis police officer at the time.
Hall responded to Beckmann’s accusations in a letter to the council, saying he refused to be “bullied or intimidated by a group of people who don’t actually have the best interests of Normandy in mind, only their own agenda.”
Meanwhile, Fitzgerald, whom Hunt had appointed as public works supervisor, and Leslie Rogers, who had been hired as a payroll specialist, said their jobs quickly became untenable because of Beckmann’s leadership. Both said in interviews they still suffer anxiety from the experience.
Both resigned in September and filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging discrimination because they are Black women.
“The constant bickering between the mayor and council and the mayor retaliating against me personally whenever things don’t go right for him is mentally exhausting, unacceptable and totally unprofessional,” Fitzgerald wrote in her letter. “I wanted to be a part of the progression in Normandy … but that seems impossible.”
Beckmann said he could “barely read” Fitzgerald’s letter because it was filled with so many “misstatements and untruths.” He spoke in general terms about a complaint that came after the resignations and said they were part of an “orchestrated effort to undermine me.”
“There are some who are willing to watch the city burn,” he said. “That’s what I believe.”
Mortgaging City Hall
Things again came to a boil in August when the mayor used his own money to file a lawsuit against six council members, accusing them of wrongfully firing a police sergeant and illegally appointing a city attorney. Beckmann sought to become the city administrator until a permanent replacement could be found.
A judge last week ruled that the firing of the police sergeant was illegal and the mayor could serve as a de facto city administrator, pleasing Beckmann and his supporters. The city attorney, Anthony Gray, will remain at his post.
But an impeachment threat from some council members still looms. The council voted in late August to move forward with an inquiry, and Hunt said an attorney was gathering information. He declined to specify what would be included in the impeachment articles.
The butting of heads continued, with Beckmann questioning an earlier deal to buy a funeral home across the street from City Hall.
Officials had been eyeing the former Austin A. Layne mortuary to become a new City Hall after the current building, at 7700 Natural Bridge Road, was placed under contract as part of a $60 million mixed-use development.
That project fell through in fall 2020, but the city moved forward in December with the purchase of the mortuary building for $1.1 million — roughly $200,000 over the listed appraisal price. Officials mortgaged the current City Hall as part of the deal.
Hunt said the previous council had planned to buy the mortuary using money from the sale of City Hall as well as city-owned cell towers and a former gas station.
But he said COVID-19 and the canceled development got in the way, and so the city was on the hook for the new building and a mortgage on City Hall. He blamed Beckmann for not executing their plan and for allowing the mortuary to sit vacant.
A decent government
Beckmann said he was “hopeful” for the future now that he has legal authority to oversee day-to-day operations. He noted the council recently agreed to a budget, and he was working to hire more workers.
One of Beckmann’s most outspoken supporters, his sister-in-law and former Councilwoman Terry Gannon, said the silver lining to the rift was that so many people from across the city have been galvanized to participate in local government. She said she knows of people who plan to run for council next year.
“People in all the wards know about this antagonism and they’re outraged,” she said. “When you have 80 people coming to a City Hall meeting and that many people on Zoom, people in their own neighborhoods passing out fliers and showing up to confront their council members … I think that’s wonderful,” she said.
But some council members remain skeptical.
Councilwoman Erma Ratlif, who briefly left the council before running again in 2020, said she constantly felt pressure by the mayor and his allies to vote in lock-step, and she worried about Beckmann’s use of city money.
On a broader scale, Ratlif said she wanted leadership in the city to reflect the racial makeup of the community.
“I want Normandy to be the best, most diverse place it can be,” she said.
Both sides agree that hiring a city manager could resolve some of the disputes, but they have so far disagreed on who to hire.
The community has gone more than a decade without a city administrator, and some say it will take a strong dose of professional management and fresh policies to keep the city functioning.
Fischesser, who served nearly three months as city administrator, said that without a change, he worries residents could be in danger of losing some of their services.
“The only reason I agreed to help out was because I wanted to see the people there have a decent environment and decent government,” he said. “I was really beginning to question with the practices in place whether the citizens could continue to enjoy the services there.”
Pat Kelly, director of the Municipal League of Metro St. Louis, said leaders needed to be reminded of the ultimate goal of local government: working for the residents.
“That’s really why the legislative branch and the executive branch need to focus on what their job is, and that is to provide services, instead of focusing on who ultimately gets to make that decision,” he said.